Dear Kay,
Because there’s nothing better than frolicking on the chilly beach in your new wool and cotton cardigan . . .
I hadn’t picked out buttons yet, so it was buttonless, which for this sweater actually matters. It really wants to be buttoned.
It all fits. The seams were a real odyssey in connecting unmatching cables. I just sat down at a table with the thing and made executive decision after executive decision. The side...

Dear Kay,
While on spring break vacation, we had a lot of time for watching movies. One of the adventures in vacation rentals is poking around the bookshelves to see what the owners left behind for the amusement of their renters. All I can say is that we really need to think hard about becoming James Patterson, Anne Rivers Siddons, or Reader’s Digest Condensed Books SO MUCH. There was not a single knitting book in the place. The...

Dear Kay,
At this point, this Rowan Pearl sweater has turned into something akin to backyard wrestling. I’m totally punch drunk, just adding flaps of stuff wherever the pattern tells me to, whacking the thing with a folding chair. I’m in the twelfth round with this sweater. At any moment, I’m getting out the staple gun and the barbed wire.
For those keeping track, the collar took a whole ball of Rowan Wool Cotton, once I...

Dear Kay,
Hope you’re surviving the BLIZZARD OF THE CENTURY or whatever it is the Weather Channel guy keeps trying to convince us about. We had our own shocking snow event here the other night: the almost-an-inch has us shut us down to the point that we’re living off our leftover 9/11 supplies–I mean, Progresso soups NEVER EXPIRE, do they?
Clif managed to go snow skating even when there wasn’t technically any snow left...

Dear Kay,
At this point, my Rowan Pearl sweater is done and undone. I am slogging through the sleeves, which are nothing but an endless series of leaning cables–a real pair of soul suckers if anybody’s looking for a Lenten discipline. In the interest of Doing Something Else To Cut The Tedium, I decided to get ahead of the game with a stout, boot-camp style blocking of the fronts and backs. You know: a multi-day marathon to get these...

Dear Kay,
Motoring along here on Rowan 32’s Pearl. This will be a quick note today because I’m still suffering the aftereffects of leaving another movie in the middle because it was so appalling.
[WARNING: The Wrestler SPOILER ALERT and also some gruesome imagery ahead, so skip ahead to the cat playing on the handknits if you’re as squeamish as I am.]
Yesterday, a galpal who shall remain nameless because she was seen at the...

Dear Kay,
Holy cow, I think my mom’s sweater is haunted!
Get this: yesterday, while wearing the cabled fisherman’s sweater my mom made 30 years ago–back when she was, you know, alive–I found myself strangely drawn to the top shelf of my closet, that netherland where unfinished objects marinate until they either decay, spontaneously unravel, or otherwise meet some dismal fate. At a time of day when I usually scramble...